Audit Says Police Fall Short in Providing Interpreters

When Esther Jimenez called the police to her Staten Island home last year, she showed them the scratches on her arm. She told them that her husband had attacked her in front of their children. He had pushed her into a wall, she said, and knocked their youngest child from her arms.

But the officers could not understand: She spoke only Spanish. They spoke English.

According to New York Police Department protocol, the officers should have gotten an interpreter for her, but Ms. Jimenez said they did not. Lawyers at Staten Island Legal Services, who represented Ms. Jimenez, 27, said the police never filed a report after the visit.

A new federal review into how police interact with the city’s vast immigrant population suggests that Ms. Jimenez’s experience was not unusual. The review, by the Justice Department’s Office for Civil Rights, found the department often fails to ensure that New Yorkers who do not speak English have critical access to certified interpreters when seeking police assistance.

The 10-month review concluded that the department is not fully complying with federal civil rights laws and must do more to provide non-English speakers with “meaningful access to its services.”

“It is clear the department needs to take further action to ensure that it adequately provides language assistance services to people with limited English proficiency,” Michael L. Alston, director of the civil rights office, wrote in the conclusion of the 43-page report. The report was sent to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly on Nov. 8 along with instructions to develop timelines and goals for remedying the multiple deficiencies found in the review.

Police officials said that while some points in the report “may bear some merit,” they strongly disputed the findings that the department was out of compliance. In a 17-page response to the civil rights office in October, the department said the reviewers relied on anecdotal information “to make broad conclusions regarding our language-access practices and the ability to provide meaningful access that are based on little, if any, factual data to support such conclusions.”

“We do this better than anyone else, in far greater numbers than anyone else,” Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said in a statement on Thursday. “That’s the forest the Justice Department missed for the trees. They don’t get New York.”

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Esther Jimenez said police officers did not get her an interpreter after they responded to a 911 call to her Staten Island apartment.Credit
Mary DiBiase Blaich for The New York Times

The Police Department has made strides in its efforts to increase the number of foreign-language speakers in its ranks, stressing that those skills are integral to counterterrorism efforts and in responding to day-to-day street crime in a city where more than a fifth of its inhabitants speak limited or no English. It also boasts of interpretation services that are intended to leave no foreign speakers isolated from getting help from officers on the street, over the phone or in any of the department’s precincts across the five boroughs.

Yet the Justice Department’s review found an array of shortcomings in the department’s linguistic services. Among these deficiencies is a significant lack of certified interpreters for some of the city’s most commonly spoken foreign languages like Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Italian.

Even when trained interpreters are available, officers and supervisors in the field often failed to call on them. Instead, officers “frequently rely on bystanders to interpret for them,” the report noted. One commanding officer explained to federal reviewers that he used his fiancée to interpret for him with a non-English speaking prisoner because “it was quicker and easier to rely on her than to ask Operations to send a certified interpreter.”

The review found that in domestic violence cases, officers sometimes relied on family members and even children to help interpret, despite department guidelines stating that “all steps should be taken to avoid using a child as an interpreter.”

Compliance is necessary under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to receive federal grants.

The Justice Department began reviewing the Police Department in January as part of a routine audit to measure its interactions with New Yorkers who do not speak English, whether they are being arrested, stopped on the street or trying to get help in cases of domestic violence. Mr. Alston said in an interview on Thursday that though the steps needed to address the shortcomings “may look like a lot,” they were not overwhelming, and that the department was already undertaking many.

The department’s use of Language Line, a multilingual interpretation service, was one of the things reviewers raised questions about. Every precinct has access to the service, and the department said sergeants in the field are equipped with cellphones linked to it. But several police employees, including one commanding officer, told Justice officials that their patrol supervisors “do not, in fact, have Language Line-equipped cellphones,” the report said.

Police officials have said they have 14,000 employees with foreign-language skills who provide interpretative services through the department’s Volunteer Language Program. But in the vast majority of cases, the department does not verify whether these individuals are in fact qualified to provide language assistance. Only a small fraction are sent to training programs like Berlitz to be certified interpreters.

For example, the department only has 12 certified Spanish interpreters, one for every 76,748 Spanish-speaking residents, the report said.

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A federal review has found the Police Department to be inconsistent in dealings with non-English speakers, like Esther Jimenez.Credit
Mary DiBiase Blaich for The New York Times

For many of the commonly spoken foreign languages in New York City, the number of certified interpreters “appears to fall significantly short of the need,” the report said.

The department said it was unaware of any federal regulation requiring certified interpreters and that the reviewers failed to find a single case where “one of our noncertified interpreters failed to translate properly.” Mr. Browne also noted that while they may not be certified, the department has more than 10,000 Spanish speakers.

The reviewers also found inconsistent procedures in the department’s handling of domestic violence complaints from non-English speakers. In three meetings with community groups in April, victims’ advocates reported that officers in the field sometimes relied on the male suspect to translate, rather than interviewing the victim through an interpreter. Then, based on the statement of the accused, the officers sometimes concluded that a report was unwarranted.

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Police officers told the reviewers they did not rely on the accused to interpret for a victim. But the officers did tell them they sometimes relied on other family members or children to interpret, against department guidelines.

The reviewers also found varying accounts about how officers complete and file domestic violence reports, which include a section for victims to write their allegations in their primary language. The review found that officers, however, sometimes prepared the statements in English and discouraged victims from submitting statements in their own language.

Victims’ advocates have complained that the reports were often left blank or improperly translated, hampering their cases in court.

Ms. Jimenez was recently separated and involved in a bitter custody battle when her life intersected with the police. She said her husband had flown into a rage at her apartment in Staten Island when she tried to photograph him with the children to prove she was complying with his visitation rights.

She called 911 and reported that he had shoved and hurt her. The operator, who spoke Spanish, said police officers were on their way. They arrived about 30 minutes later but stayed only about five minutes as she tried to explain her plight, she recalled.

“They did not write anything down,” Ms. Jimenez said.

Mr. Browne said he was unfamiliar with the case, and said that out of millions of police contacts with non-English speakers every year, not all were perfect. “But our foreign-language outreach is better than any in the U.S. and possibly the world.”

Al Baker contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 19, 2010, on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Audit Says Police Fall Short In Providing Interpreters. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe